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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

The problem is it was easy to center things with tables. Then once CSS was popular, that was the "wrong way" to handle layout. I find CSS the worst part of web development, and it's what turned me off of front-end work. Glad flexbox has finally made things simpler again.

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I like CSS but I'd agree that tables got a bad rap. They were very easy, very effective, and only occasionally turned into a nightmare of nesting that was impossible to maintain

My problem with CSS now is that it's gotten too bloated to the point where it's introducing privacy and security risks. I really want an add-on that restricts CSS by default to only a sane subset of features.

Using tables for layouts is an accessibility nightmare.

They're also awful to maintain over time, if you're needing to add new elements and require new columns or cells (and then there's the need to nest tables when using them for layout).

I attempted to fix a website by adding closing table cells that were missing, and finally got the page to validate as XHTML Strict and Transitional. The entire layout shifted, and was completely based on those missing end tags.

it's really not. It requires adding a single attribute to tables that exist for layout.

What attribute? And how do you affect the reading order? Say on a page with a side navigation?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

How does that solve anything? Your dom order is still tied to your presentation.

Google for "The Web is Ruined and I Ruined It" written by the guy who first came up with the idea to use tables for layout.

There weren't really many other options in the 90's.

Not the point. The point was that some people still think there is nothing wrong with using tables for layout. The guy who started it all would like to have a word with them.

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